LTspice Goes OS X: Somebody Uses a Mac

This week, Linear Technology announced Mac OS X support for its LTSpice circuit-simulation software. LTspice, which now runs on OS X 10.7 and later, lets you simulate designs before committing to hardware and is available at no cost.

The fact that Linear ported LTSpice to the Mac came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I rarely run into an engineer who uses a Mac, at least for test and measurement. Sure, engineers have been using LabVIEW for the Mac, by National Instruments, since 1986. LabVIEW was originally developed for the Mac because DOS didnít have sufficient graphics support at the time. NI also supports hardware for data-acquisition and instrument control on the Mac.

I was unaware that test engineers used the Mac for anything but LabVIEW, so the LTspice announcement was a wake-up call. If you're a Mac user, tell us how to use it. Are there other engineering applications available for the Mac that you use?

As long as we're on the topic of non-Windows operating systems for test applications, do you use Linux for test and measurement? Linux is certainly popular for embedded applications, but what about for instrument control? I remember several years ago a pair of articles called "Get Those Boards Talking Under Linux," parts one and two, but that was quite some time ago.

"Hmm, DL'd the latest...none of the apps runs, and the Python script does nothing. I'm impressed. Also impressed by the confused state of the website. Hmm."

I'm not sure if the latest is stable. I use the 4107 version from April. The Kicad devs have done a lot of revising the PCB and library file formats after that version.

Download the package and unarchive it. You'll get the resulting KiCad directory. Drag that somewhere useful, perhaps into your home directory, perhaps into /Applications (which I did).

The applications should open without issue. Start with launching the kicad program; that's the umbrella app/project manager. From there you can create new projects and from with a project you can create schematics and PCB layouts.

NB: in that archive is a directory called data. That directory includes the default libraries and templates. On OS X, the applications all prefer to see the libraries in ~/Library/Application Support/kicad, so move data to that location (rename data to kicad). In that directory, the subdirectory library holds the schematic symbols and the subdirectory modules holds the footprints.

"It is easy for me to blame the OS, when I can directly compare win7 running the latest firefox to MacOSX running the latest firefox on the same exact hardware. One crashes regularly, the other is windows. "

I'm truly sorry, but your argument is still baseless. It's the APPLICATION that keeps crashing, so the developers of the APPLICATION need to get their act together.